Hypergamy: How the harebrained notions of white nationalist F. Roger Devlin took the Manosphere by storm

Another in an ongoing series of posts on seminal works in the manosphere canon, as it were. At some point, I’ll make a page for these.

Like Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, F. Roger Devlin’s 2006 essay Sexual Utopia in Power (downloadable here) is a kind of Manospherianurtext, an original source of many of the terrible ideas that are now accepted as gospel wherever misogynists gather in large numbers online. Though the name of Devlin is hardly as well known as that of Farrell, many of his ideas, most notably his reworked notion of “hypergamy” — which we will get to in a minute — are omnipresent in the manosphere.

Among misogynists with intellectual pretensions, Devlin’s Sexual Utopia is considered a must-read. Originally brought to the attention of fellow manospherians by PUA pseudointellectual Roissy — now Heartiste — in 2007, the essay has received lavish praise on such familiar sites as The Spearhead (where WF Price praised Devlin’s “critiques of feminism” as “some of the best out there”) and A Voice for Men (where one post described the essay as “supremely indispensable.”) It’s listed in the sidebar of The Red Pill subreddit as “required reading.” And Norwegian MRA Eivind Berge gushed that the essay was

possibly the best article I have ever read. My blogging against feminism is almost redundant after F. Roger Devlin has put it so well.

So what exactly are all these guys falling over themselves to praise so highly? To put it bluntly, a strange and sprawling compendium of ideas that range from frankly abhorrent to merely silly, motivated by misogyny and racism. Virtually none of the essay’s many gross generalizations about women (or men) are supported by any sort of evidence.

And did I mention that it originally ran in a white nationalist journal?

While the bulk of Devlin’s essay deals with gender, not race, it is framed — in the very first sentence — by his concern over what he calls the “catastrophic decline” of “white birthrates worldwide.” In other words, no one who has read his article, even if they don’t know what the Occidental Quarterly is, can possibly miss Devlin’s fundamental racism (which is spelled out even more explicitly at the end of this piece).

There is so much in Devlin’s essay that is so objectionable that it cannot fit in a single post, so today I will focus only on his reworked notion of “hypergamy.”

The term was originally a technical way of saying “marrying up” — that is, “the act or practice of marrying a spouse of higher caste or status than oneself,” as Wikipedia rather unromantically puts it.

In Devlin’s hands, the term comes to mean something entirely different:

It is sometimes said that men are polygamous and women monogamous. …

It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best. These different male and female “sexual orientations” are clearly seen among the lower primates, e.g., in a baboon pack. Females compete to mate at the top, males to get to the top.

This may sound vaguely familiar to you. Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground’s first album that only 30,000 people may have bought copies of it, but “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Similarly, everyone who has read Devlin seems to have started a blog or YouTube channel.

Women, in fact, have a distinctive sexual utopia corresponding to their hypergamous instincts. In its purely utopian form, it has two parts: First, she mates with her incubus, the imaginary perfect man; and, second, he “commits,” or ceases mating with all other women. This is the formula of much pulp romance fiction. The fantasy is strictly utopian, partly because no perfect man exists, but partly also because even if he did, it is logically impossible for him to be the exclusive mate of all the women who desire him.

It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men. In the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes the women of Athens stage a coup d’état. They occupy the legislative assembly and barricade their husbands out. Then they proceed to enact a law by which the most attractive males of the city will be compelled to mate with each female in turn, beginning with the least attractive. That is the female sexual utopia in power.

And yes, we are rapidly moving towards the manosphere myth that virtually all women are having sex with the same tiny number of men.

Although there may be only one “alpha male” at the top of the pack at any given time, which one it is changes over time. In human terms, this means the female is fickle, infatuated with no more than one man at any given time, but not naturally loyal to a husband over the course of a lifetime.

From here, it seems, comes the widespread manosphere myth that women are inherently amoral creatures who will instantly dump whatever man they’re with whenever an alpha strolls by.

Devlin is also the apparent source of the related manosphere myth that most men live lives of quiet celibacy.

An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males.

Indeed, Devlin is so convinced by this notion that he simply hand-waves away all data to the contrary.

Survey results are occasionally announced apparently indicating male satisfaction with their “sex lives” and female unhappiness with theirs. This creates an impression that there really is “more sex” for men today than before some misguided girls misbehaved themselves forty years ago. …

It is child’s play to show, not merely that this is untrue, but that it cannot be true. … What happens when female sexual desire is liberated is not an increase in the total amount of sex available to men, but a redistribution of the existing supply. Society becomes polygamous. A situation emerges in which most men are desperate for wives, but most women are just as desperately throwing themselves at a very few exceptionally attractive men. …

Devlin is sometimes described as an “independent scholar,” but even aside from its misogyny and racism “Sexual Utopia in Power” is anything but scholarly. There are only a relative handful of footnotes, which don’t come close to backing up Devlin’s numerous factual claims. Most of the footnotes refer to the writings not of scholars but of conservative and far-right journalists. One links to an article on the racist hate site VDare.com; another favorably cites this article by Henry Makow, an early Men’s Rights Activist turned conspiracy theorist who literally believes that feminists are in league with an evil Satanic-Illuminati cult that rules the world.

Devlin offers precisely zero evidence to back up his claims about hypergamy — aside from a couple of surveys, whose conclusions he rejects, and several quotes from literature, including that one from Oscar Wilde. The rest is, to use the formal term for it, assdata.

But so far essentially the only people who have picked up on this particular definition of hypergamy have been misogynists, pickup artists, MRAs and others vaguely associated with, or around, the manosphere. The only academic I know of who has ever even addressed Devlin’s peculiar thesis is libertarian economist Tyler Cowan, who wrote about it briefly, and I think accurately, on his blog several years back.

This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously). The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle. So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak. The birth rate falls, for one thing. The piece also claims that the modern “abolition” of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive. Some of you will hate the piece. I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea.

As an actual idea, new or old, this is probably all the consideration Devlin‘s version of “hypergamy” really deserves. But as a case study in the history and sociology of bad ideas, the strange story of Devlin’s hypergamy is a bit more interesting, and I no doubt will return to it in future posts.

There is also a good deal in Devlin’s essay that’s a good deal worse than his discussion of hypergamy, and I’ll be coming back to that as well.

I thought men wanted monogamy to make sure the children they produced were in fact their own. It was wasteful evolution-wise for a man to raise the children of other men. Not to mention, if men are unfaithful and women are not, then are all these unfaithful men sleeping with the same woman?

Ok, I know this is an old post, so I don’t know if anyone will still read this or not but…I actually love the idea of hypergamy. Here’s why: because it is where the MRA’s actually show their Achilles heel and hand women ALL the sexual power.

I am not saying hypergamy exists. What I am saying is that since they think it exists, I say everything I can think of to make it appear like it is a real thing when I am writing in a space I know the PUA’s will read. I enjoy knowing that they constantly fear that no woman will ever really be faithful to THEM. They already believe this about women, so I like just using their own theory to put it back in their faces and say “thank for handing me all your power, you are right, every woman you are with is eventually going to dump you for a BBD”.

Men who aren’t MRA/PUA fanatics don’t take offense to the idea of hypergamy or they don’t think about it at all. They simply overlook it with a “what? that’s a thing?” Only the MRA/PUA pool of guys seem so worried about it or think it is real.

On the flip side, I believe a case for human beings being naturally non-monogamous is easily made by many sources, so it is easy to weave in the idea of hypergamy because really, it is just saying that “women are naturally non-monogamous”. And women of course also have to accept and acknowledge that men are naturally non-monogamous, too. As far as being non-monogamous, yep, we all are.

But the MRA/PUA guys, well they are just OUTRAGED by hypergamy specifically…so I figure…um…yes guys…it DOES exist. In your case, you really *are* likely going to get dumped for a better human being.

In your case, you really *are* likely going to get dumped for a better human being.

I like your definition of hypergamy there:nothing to do with money or power or any of the nonsense they make up. But better human being means they really are in deep shit, because So. Many. People. fit that description. 🙂

A thought on an old post on an even older thread, but still…
The consequences are rather not funny of accepting “hypergamy” to exist…. messed up grammar but anyway:
What qualities does a supposed “alpha male” have? It actually doesn’t really matter as sooner or later it must be something others have while those sprouting said idea lack. As they see themselve superior to others, either in part or in whole, the thing lacking becomes an outdated biological thing. Once it made sense in an animal survival thing but now it hinders the social progress of the human race (it must, or else the “right” kind of people would be getting laid).
Women are thus either a slave to a biological urge or in other words stupid, or willing participient which means evil. Welcome to California.

The data on hook up culture do not support Devlin’s theory on the redistribution of sex. For his theory to be true, the virgin rate of males would have to be higher than the virgin rate of females. The data show that this is not so. The same percentage of men and women are virgins — approximately 25%, and this percentage has been steadily increasing. (note: the data was sourced from college campuses.)

Interestingly, the virgin rate is increasing. Why?

Perhaps it has to do with the pervasiveness of hot people and sex. Hot people having sex, talking about sex, and insinuating sex is everywhere. From the televisions shows to the ads in between the television shows. And because this is all happening in the age of entitlement, perhaps average people feel entitled to sex with hot people?

But nature dictates that this cannot be so. Average people cannot have sex with hot people.

So perhaps average people, in their belief that they are entitled to “hot people,” are holding out on sex, waiting for their due “hot” sex.

So the effect of this is average people refusing to have sex with one another because they think that they are entitled to hot people — and thus the virgin rate is increasing.

I think this theory is pretty good, and i would be interested in other’s thoughts.

Hi! Well, I like how you are attacking this piece (hopefully you came back to it as I am reading this anew), but I think you have the main intellectual might here (the concept of hypergamy) from the rest of the piece that is most insidiously dangerous. I agree with Tyler Cowan that the man is evil. I want an eviscerating critique that basically tears this piece apart, paragraph by paragraph with hard science. He’s little known and for good reason but this shit paper is enough to get a huge smack down. It’s ill informed and deep in untrue concepts not backed up by evidence or fact. It’s straight evil shrouded as intellectual.

The ideas behind it are absurd yet many men have fallen prey to its glitter of intellectual satisfaction. Science and the data do NOT support it. I read this crap article and felt intellectually raped. I want this thing thrown to the fire. As far as I’m concerned he committed intellectual suicide by publishing this piece.

In re “And did I mention that it originally ran in a white nationalist journal?”, please stick to debunking the central premise of Mssr. Devlin’s article. Any departure gives Misogynists an opportunity to say, “Ya see? People have to resort to fallacies like attacking the Messenger because They cannot find an actual flaw in the actual reasoning.”

The article conveniently forgets to include the complete fundamentals of Devlin’s book, which is Michelle Langley’s (i.e. female) research and book, which explains the biology behind women’s infidelity. A particular part of women’s biology that women either haven’t been aware of themselves or have made sure not to talk about, again proving the point that the people this mamooth site so callously call misogynist.Mrs/Ms Langley is the person who made me turn to mgtow, not a man. But as a previous anti-feminist and feminist I am used to critique or scrutiny or biological study of females as being labeled misogynistic. So please keep on going. This helps.
Hypergamy exists and is so obvious and is just one of many pointers that women are unable to love. No big deal, but women should just admit it already.

The article conveniently forgets to include the complete fundamentals of Devlin’s book, which is Michelle Langley’s (i.e. female) research and book, which explains the biology behind women’s infidelity.

I personally have not read the book (not that I would ever care to), but I am sure that Mr. Devlin’s opus would also include the fundamentals of the research of the biology behind men’s infidelity?

Well, maybe not, since most of them being beta losers and “incel” but wait… what about the alphas? All that hot, depraved sex with all those different women? At the same time even?

But as a previous anti-feminist and feminist…

And now a MGTOW?

So, I guess you’re saying you’ve come full circle?

I am used to critique or scrutiny or biological study of females as being labeled misogynistic.

Given your self-professed anti-feminist to feminist[?] to MGTOW arc, I wonder what could lead any detached, rational observer to that conclusion?

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.